This post is a post-publication self-review, a review of our paper on the validation of statistical homogenization methods, also called benchmarking when it is a community effort. Since writing this benchmarking article we have understood the problem better and have found some weaknesses. I have explained these problems on conferences, but for the people that did not hear them, please find them below after a short introduction. We have a new paper in open review that explains how we want to do better in the next benchmarking study.

Benchmarking homogenization methods

In our benchmarking paper we generated a dataset that mimicked real temperature or precipitation data. To this data we added non-climatic changes (inhomogeneities). We requested the climatologists to homogenize this data, to remove the inhomogeneities we had inserted. How good the homogenization algorithms are can be seen by comparing the homogenized data to the original homogeneous data.

This is straightforward science, but the realism of the dataset was the best to date and because this project was part of a large research program (the COST Action HOME) we had a large number of contributions. Mathematical understanding of the algorithms is also important, but homogenization algorithms are complicated methods and it is also possible to make errors in the implementation, thus such numerical validations are also valuable. Both approaches complement each other.

Group photo at a meeting of the COST Action HOME with most of the European homogenization community present. These are those people working in ivory towers, eating caviar from silver plates, drinking 1985 Romanee-Conti Grand Cru from crystal glasses and living in mansions. Enjoying the good live on the public teat, while conspiring against humanity.

The main conclusions were that homogenization improves the homogeneity of temperature data. Precipitation is more difficult and only the best algorithms were able to improve it. We found that modern methods improved the quality of temperature data about twice as much as traditional methods. It is thus important that people switch to one of these modern methods. My impression from the recent Homogenisation seminar and the upcoming European Meteorological Society (EMS) meeting is that this seems to be happening.

1. Missing homogenization methods

An impressive number of methods participated in HOME. Also many manual methods were applied, which are validated less because this is more work. All the state-of-the-art methods participated and most of the much used methods. However, we forgot to test a two- or multi-phase regression method, which is popular in North America.

Also not validated is HOMER, the algorithm that was designed afterwards using the best parts of the tested algorithms. We are working on this. Many people have started using HOMER. Its validation should thus be a high priority for the community.

2. Size breaks (random walk or noise)

Next to the benchmark data with the inserted inhomogeneities, we also asked people to homogenize some real datasets. This turned out to be very important because it allowed us to validate how realistic the benchmark data is. Information we need to make future studies more realistic. In this validation we found that the size of the benchmark in homogeneities was larger than those in the real data. Expressed as the standard deviation of the break size distribution, the benchmark breaks were typically 0.8°C and the real breaks were only 0.6°C.

This was already reported in the paper, but we now understand why. In the benchmark, the inhomogeneities were implemented by drawing a random number for every homogeneous period and perturbing the original data by this amount. In other words, we added noise to the homogeneous data. However, the homogenizers that requested to make breaks with a size of about 0.8°C were thinking of the difference from one homogeneous period to the next. The size of such breaks is influenced by two random numbers. Because variances are additive, this means that the jumps implemented as noise were the square root of two (about 1.4) times too large.

The validation showed that, except for the size, the idea of implementing the inhomogeneities as noise was a good approximation. The alternative would be to draw a random number and use that to perturb the data relative to the previously perturbed period. In that case you implement the inhomogeneities as a random walk. Nobody thought of reporting it, but it seems that most validation studies have implemented their inhomogeneities as random walks. This makes the influence of the inhomogeneities on the trend much larger. Because of the larger error, it is probably easier to achieve relative improvements, but because the initial errors were absolutely larger, the absolute errors after homogenization may well have been too large in previous studies.

You can see the difference between a noise perturbation and a random walk by comparing the sign (up or down) of the breaks from one break to the next. For example, in case of noise and a large upward jump, the next change is likely to make the perturbation smaller again. In case of a random walk, the size and sign of the previous break is irrelevant. The likeliness of any sign is one half.

In other words, in case of a random walk there are just as much up-down and down-up pairs as there are up-up and down-down pairs, every combination has a chance of one in four. In case of noise perturbations, up-down and down-up pairs (platform-like break pairs) are more likely than up-up and down-down pairs. The latter is what we found in the real datasets. Although there is a small deviation that suggests a small random walk contribution, but that may also be because the inhomogeneities cause a trend bias.

3. Signal to noise ratio varies regionally

The HOME benchmark reproduced a typical situation in Europe (the USA is similar). However, the station density in much of the world is lower. Inhomogeneities are detected and corrected by comparing a candidate station to neighbouring ones. When the station density is less, this difference signal is more noisy and this makes homogenization more difficult. Thus one would expect that the performance of homogenization methods is lower in other regions. Although, also the break frequency and break size may be different.

Thus to estimate how large the influence of the remaining inhomogeneities can be on the global mean temperature, we need to study the performance of homogenization algorithms in a wider range of situations. Also for the intercomparison of homogenization methods (the more limited aim of HOME) the signal (break size) to noise ratio is important. Domonkos (2013) showed that the ranking of various algorithms depends on the signal to noise ratio. Ralf Lindau and I have just submitted a manuscript that shows that for low signal to noise ratios, the multiple breakpoint method PRODIGE is not much better in detecting breaks than a method that would "detect" random breaks, while it works fine for higher signal to noise ratios. Other methods may also be affected, but possibly not in the same amount. More on that later.

4. Regional trends (absolute homogenization)

The initially simulated data did not have a trend, thus we explicitly added a trend to all stations to give the data a regional climate change signal. This trend could be both upward or downward, just to check whether homogenization methods might have problems with downward trends, which are not typical of daily operations. They do not.

Had we inserted a simple linear trend in the HOME benchmark data, the operators of the manual homogenization could have theoretically used this information to improve their performance. If the trend is not linear, there are apparently still inhomogeneities in the data. We wanted to keep the operators in the blind. Consequently, we inserted a rather complicated and variable nonlinear trend in the dataset.

As already noted in the paper, this may have handicapped the participating absolute homogenization method. Homogenization methods used in climate are normally relative ones. These methods compare a station to its neighbours, both have the same regional climate signal, which is thus removed and not important. Absolute methods do not use the information from the neighbours; these methods have to make assumptions about the variability of the real regional climate signal. Absolute methods have problems with gradual inhomogeneities and are less sensitive and are therefore not used much.

If absolute methods are participating in future studies, the trend should be modelled more realistically. When benchmarking only automatic homogenization methods (no operator) an easier trend should be no problem.

5. Length of the series

The station networks simulated in HOME were all one century long, part of the stations were shorter because we also simulated the build up of the network during the first 25 years. We recently found that criterion for the optimal number of break inhomogeneities used by one of the best homogenization methods (PRODIGE) does not have the right dependence on the number of data points (Lindau and Venema, 2013). For climate datasets that are about a century long, the criterion is quite good, but for much longer or shorter datasets there are deviations. This illustrates that the length of the datasets is also important and that it is important for benchmarking that the data availability is the same as in real datasets.

Another reason why it is important that the benchmark data availability to be the same as in the real dataset is that this makes the comparison of the inhomogeneities found in the real data and in the benchmark more straightforward. This comparison is important to make future validation studies more accurate.

6. Non-climatic trend bias

The inhomogeneities we inserted in HOME were on average zero. For the stations this still results in clear non-climatic trend errors because you only average over a small number of inhomogeneities. For the full networks the number of inhomogeneities is larger and the non-climatic trend error thus very small. It was consequently very hard for the homogenization methods to improve this small errors. It is expected that in real raw datasets there is a larger non-climatic error. Globally the non-climatic trend will be relatively small, but within one network, where the stations experienced similar (technological and organisational) changes, it can be appreciable. Thus we should model such a non-climatic trend bias explicitly in future.

The standard break sizes will be made smaller. We will make ten benchmarking "worlds" with different kinds of inserted inhomogeneities and will also vary the size and number of the inhomogeneities. Because the ISTI benchmarks will mirror the real data holdings of the ISTI, the station density and the length of the data will be the same. The regional climate signal will be derived from a global circulation models and absolute methods could thus participate. Finally, we will introduce a clear non-climate trend bias to several of the benchmark "worlds".

The paper on the ISTI benchmark is open for discussions at the journal Geoscientific Instrumentation, Methods and Data Systems. Please find the abstract below.
Abstract. The International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) is striving towards substantively improving our ability to robustly understand historical land surface air temperature change at all scales. A key recently completed first step has been collating all available records into a comprehensive open access, traceable and version-controlled databank. The crucial next step is to maximise the value of the collated data through a robust international framework of benchmarking and assessment for product intercomparison and uncertainty estimation. We focus on uncertainties arising from the presence of inhomogeneities in monthly surface temperature data and the varied methodological choices made by various groups in building homogeneous temperature products. The central facet of the benchmarking process is the creation of global scale synthetic analogs to the real-world database where both the "true" series and inhomogeneities are known (a luxury the real world data do not afford us). Hence algorithmic strengths and weaknesses can be meaningfully quantified and conditional inferences made about the real-world climate system. Here we discuss the necessary framework for developing an international homogenisation benchmarking system on the global scale for monthly mean temperatures. The value of this framework is critically dependent upon the number of groups taking part and so we strongly advocate involvement in the benchmarking exercise from as many data analyst groups as possible to make the best use of this substantial effort.

Thursday, 26 June 2014

We have submitted a new paper. It describes how we are planning to validate the performance of homogenization methods that remove non-climatic effects from station climate data.

The way scientists write, the paper neutrally describes the new plans. For people that know the relevant scientific literature that is naturally also a critique of how we did it before, for them there is no need to spell this out and rub salt in the wounds. However, people that do not know the literature may get the impression that there are no disputes in science. Being an author on both papers and being first author of the old one, I hope I am allowed to break a little with the scientific culture and plainly describe the problems in my next post.

You could call this post-publication peer review of a scientific article. The climate dissenter may call it blog review. Post-publication review seems to be on many people's minds lately. My guess would be that this is stimulated by the increasing importance of digital publishing and social media, which make new procedures thinkable.

The most common procedure in science is that subsequent improved articles take care of problems found in published articles. It is also possible to write a so-called comment on an article, a short article that only focusses on the problems of the published paper. Being rather explicit, this is not a great way to make friends and is not used much. The authors themselves can also publish a correction or retract their articles. These procedures are all quite heavy; also these texts typically involve peer review and are printed in the journal. Because of this it is quite hard to get a comment published. So they say, I have never tried.

It may be possible to do post-publication review more loosely in the digital age. Although, while the limitation is no longer the cost of printing and shipping paper around the world, an important limitation is still the time of the reader. The problem is not getting published, but getting read (by the right people). Thus maintaining a certain quality level is still important. If it weren't we could dump the journals and all just read blogs. Does not sound like a good idea to me.

The post-publication review could be similar to the pre-publication open peer review that the European Geophysical Union (EGU) uses for some of its journals. Unfortunately, these journal do not keep the discussion open after publication. Furthermore, except for the official reviewers, the people have to sign their comments. While I understand why the editors prefer this, it reduces the number of low quality comments they have to read and moderate, I feel that also anonymous comments should be possible. Not every paper author deals with criticisms professionally.

Facilitate review after publication

Another nice example is the journal PLOS ONE. The Public Library Of Science, PLOS, is a pioneer in open-access publishing in the medical sciences. In PLOS ONE everyone can publish and the review is only for the technical correctness of the manuscript, not for its importance or impact. As far as I can judge this type of review would not be a big difference for the atmospheric sciences. I can only remember one or two manuscripts were I wrote the editor that it is a rather small incremental improvement to the literature. In almost all cases manuscripts are rejected for technical problems.

How important the expected impact of a paper is in the review may be different in other fields, economists often talk about how hard it is to get into certain journals and naturally getting published in Science or Nature is hard. In the atmospheric sciences the differences in Impact Factor between the journals are modest.

Review only after publication

The next level of escalation would be no peer review in advance, publish anything and only comment on the articles afterwards. This is advocated in the essay: Open Peer Review to Save the World by Philip Gibbs. I think he is serious, but this surely is an overestimation of the importance of peer review. Gibbs had manuscripts rejected because he has no academic affiliation. That is something that must not to happen. Period. Clearly there are many problems with peer review. However, this alternative model is very similar to the blogosphere and we see what kind of quality that produces.

The limitation for scientific progress is not the number of potential interesting ideas, it is the build up of reliable knowledge. Not having a peer review before publication could backfire for speciality topics and for unknown authors; such papers need the review to obtain the initial credibility to get people to take the idea seriously. You already see in the EGU open review that mostly only the assigned reviewers give their opinion and that reviews by others is rare. With the large number of scientists today, people working on projects and often changing topic and the importance of interdisciplinary research, I do not think that a return to personal credibility to judge if a paper is worth reading would be beneficial for science. Only the papers written or recommended by a hand full of well-known people would be taken seriously and the rest would struggle harder to get people to invest their time to read them.

I would argue that some selection for manuscripts and comments is important to keep quality standards. However, for authors wanting to warn their readers of shortcomings of their papers, peer review does not seem that important. I will do so in my next post.

Sunday, 22 June 2014

There is a consensus among climate scientists that the Earth is warming, that this is mainly because of us and that it will thus continue if we do nothing. While any mainstream scientist will be able to confirm the existence of this consensus from experience, explicitly communicating this is uncomfortable to some of them. Especially in the clear way The Consensus Project does. I also feel this disease, so let me try to explain why.

1. Fuzzy definition

One reason is that the consensus is hard to define. To the above informal statement I could have added, that greenhouse gasses warm the Earth's surface, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that the increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration is mainly due to human causes, and so on. That would not have changed much and also the fraction of scientists supporting this new definition would be about the same.

You could probably also add some consequences, such as sea level rise or stronger precipitation, without much changes. However, if you would start to quantify and ask about a certain range for the climate sensitivity or add some consequences that are harder to predict, such as more drought, stronger extreme precipitation, the consensus will likely become smaller, especially as more and more scientists will feel unable to answer with confidence.

Whether there is a consensus on X or not is a question about humans. Such social science questions will always be more fuzzy as questions in the natural sciences. I guess we will just have to life with that. Just because concepts are a bit fuzzy, does not mean that it does not make sense to talk about them. If you think some aspect of this fuzziness creates problems, you can do the research to show this.

2. Scientific culture

By defining a consensus and by quantifying its support, you create two groups of scientists, mainstream and fringe. This does not fit to the culture in the scientific community to keep communication channels open to all scientists and not to exclude anyone.

Naturally, also in science, as a human enterprise, you have coalitions, but we do our best to diffuse them and even in the worst case, there are normally people on speaking terms with multiple coalitions.

Also without its quantification, the consensus exists. Thus communicating it does not make that much difference. The best antidote is for scientists to do their best to keep the lines of communication open. A colleague of mine who does great work on the homogenization thinks global warming is a NATO conspiracy. My previous boss was a climate "sceptic". Both nice people and being scientists they are able to talk about their dissent in a friendlier tone as WUWT and Co.

3. Evidence

Many people, and maybe also some scientists, may confuse consensus with evidence. For a scientist referring to a consensus is not an option in his own area of expertise. Saying "everyone believes this" is not a scientific argument.

Consensus does provide some guidance and signal credibility, especially on topics where it is easily possible to test an idea. If I had a new idea and it would require an exceptionally high or low amount of future sea level rise, I would probably not worry too much as there is not much consensus yet on these predictions and I would read this literature and see if it is possible to make matters fit somehow. If my new idea would require the greenhouse effect to be wrong, I would first try to find the error in my idea, given the strong consensus, the straight forward physics and clear experimental confirmation it would be very surprising if the greenhouse theory would be wrong.

The weight of the evidence clearly matters: The consensus in the nutritional sciences seems to be that you need to move more and eat less, especially eat less fat, to lose weight. As far as I can judge this is based on rather weak evidence. Finding hard evidence on nutrition is difficult, human bodies are highly complex, finding physical mechanisms is thus nearly impossible. The bodies of ice bears (eating lots of fat), lions (eating lots of protein) and gazelles (eating lots of carbs) are very similar. They all have arteries and the ice bears arteries do not get clogged by fat; they all have kidneys and the lions kidneys can process the protein and their bones do not melt away; they all have insulin, but the gazelles do not get diabetes or obesity from all those carbs. Traditional humans ate a similar range of diets without the chronic deceases we have seen the last generations. Also experiments with humans are difficult, especially when it comes to chronic decease where experiments would have to run over generations. Most findings on diet are thus based on observational studies, which can generate interesting hypotheses, but little hard evidence. It would be great if the nutritional sciences also wrote an IPCC-like report.

4. Contrarians

The concept "consensus" is in itself uncomfortable to many scientists. Most of us are natural contrarians and our job is to make the next consensus, not to defend the old one. Even if our studies end up validating a theory, the hope and aim of a validation study is to find an interesting deviation, that may be he beginning of a new understanding.

Given this mindset and these aims, many scientists may not notice the value of consensus theories and methods. They are what we learn during our studies. When we read scientific articles we notice on which topics there is consensus and on which there is not. When you do something new, you cannot change everything at once. Ideally a new work can be woven into the network of the other consensus ideas to become the new consensus. If this is not possible yet, there will likely be a period without consensus on that topic. If there is no consensus on a certain topic, that is a clear indication that there is work to do (if the topic is important).

5. Scientific literature

A final aspect that could be troubling is that the consensus studies were published in the scientific literature. It is a good principle to keep the political climate "debate" out of science and thus out of the scientific literature as well as possible. It is hard enough to do so. Climate dissenters regularly game the system and try to get their stuff published in the scientific literature. Peer review is not perfect and some bad manuscripts can unfortunately slip through.

One could see the publication of a consensus study as a similar attempt to exploit the scientific literature. Given that all climate scientists are already aware of the consensus, such a study does not seem to be a scientific urgency. Furthermore, Dana Nuccitelli acknowledged that one of the many aims was to make "the public more aware of the consensus".

However, many social scientists do not seem to be aware of the consensus and feel justified to see blogs such as WUWT as a contribution to a scientific debate, rather than as the political blog it is, that only pretends to be about science. One of the first consensus studies was even published in the prestigious broadly read journal Science. Replications of such a study, especially if done in another or better way seem worth publishing. The large difference in the perception of the consensus on climate change between the public and climate scientists is worth studying and these consensus studies provide an important data point to estimate this difference.

Just because the result sounds like a no-brainer is no reason not to study this and confirm the idea. Not too long ago a German newspaper reported on a study whether eating breakfast was good for weight loss. A large fraction of the comments were furious that such an obvious result had been studied with public money. I must admit, that I no longer know whether the obvious result was that if you do not eat breakfast (like Italians) you eat less and thus lose weight or whether people that eat breakfast (like Germans) are less hungry and thus compensate this by eating less during the rest of the day. I think, they did find an effect, thus the obvious result was not that it naturally does not matter when you eat.

As a natural scientist, it is hard for me to judge how much these studies contribute to the social sciences. That should be the criterion. Whether an additional aim is to educate the public seems irrelevant to me. The papers were published in journals with a broad range of topics. If there were no interest from the social science, I would prefer to write up these studies in a normal report, just like an Gallop poll. However, my estimate as outsider would be that these paper are scientifically interesting for the social sciences.

Outside of science

An important political strategy to delay action on climate is to claim that the science is not settled, that there is no consensus yet. The infamous Luntz memo from 2002 to the US Republican president stated:

Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate

This is important because the population places much trust in science. Thus holding that trust and the view that there is no climate change must produce considerable cognitive dissonance.

[Update, 23 Sept 2014. This post is now linked on Spiegel Online, where the local climate "skeptic" Axel Bojanowski needs no act as if I agree with him. I admit that the title suggests this, I was hoping to get a few "sceptics" to read it, but I was hoping that people reading the post itself would see that every single "reason" is countered. Thus Bojanowski was cherry picking, I hope it was not on purpose, but just by not reading carefully.

Axel Bojanowski calls the topic of the Cook et al. study a "banality". Because even the most hardened skeptics of the climate research do not doubt the physical basis that greenhouse gasses from cars, factories and power plants heat the atmosphere. (Selbst hartgesottene Kritiker der Klimaforschung zweifeln nicht an dem physikalischen Grundsatz, dass Treibhausgase aus Autos, Fabriken und Kraftwerken die Luft wärmen.) It would unfortunately be a great jump forward if Bojanowski was right.

Roy Spencer recently wrote a post with the "Skeptical Arguments that Don’t Hold Water". Most of which were somehow acknowledging that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that was the biggest concession he was willing to make. He realized that even this was controversial in his community and wrote in the intro:

My obvious goal here is not to change minds that are already made up, which is impossible (by definition), but to reach 1,000+ (mostly nasty) comments in response to this post. So, help me out here!

I can only conclude that some "high profile" "sceptic" bloggers pay lip service to accepting that global warming is man-made (while many of their posts do not make sense if they would). And that at least a large part of their audiences is against accepting any scientific fact that is accepted by liberals. ]

I just noticed that I had missed an insult by Anthony Watts himself, in his response to my request to remove a comment with the usual pun on my last name.

Looking at how often your cite WUWT in negative connotations, I’d say you have a fixation.

To fully appreciate the insult, you need to clicking on the link to Wikipedia. (Let's ignore the irony of Watts linking to Wikipedia in a post about how unreliable Wikipedia is and how the evil William M. Connolley single handedly turned Wikipedia into an alarmist CAWG propaganda tool. In other words, how Connolley as one of the editors and backed by the scientific literature kept their nonsense to a minimum.) Wikipedia writes about fixation (psychology) (archive):

Fixation is a concept originated by Sigmund Freud (1905) to denote the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits. ... More generally, it is the state in which an individual becomes obsessed with an attachment to another person, being, or object (in human psychology): "A strong attachment to a person or thing, especially such an attachment formed in childhood or infancy and manifested in immature or neurotic behavior that persists throughout life". ... Fixation to intangibles (i.e., ideas, ideologies, etc.) can also occur.

While minor compared to the language directed at Connolley and Mann, that is not a very nice thing to say. I would see it as an indication for a rather modest willingness to engage in a constructive dialogue to improve mutual understanding.

I guess a fitting reply would be: projection. Also part of Wikipedia's coverage of psychology.

Psychological projection is the act or technique of defending oneself against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in oneself, while attributing them to others. ... Although rooted in early developmental stages, and classed by George Eman Vaillant as an immature defence, the projection of one's negative qualities onto others on a small scale is nevertheless a common process in everyday life.

Climateball is hard to sustain if you are not having fun. Are we even now? #kindergarten

Had Mr. Watt chosen a nicer term, he would have been partially right. Let me try to explain in this post why I blog and comment on pseudo-sceptics and especially on WUWT. This post will finish with some ideas on how to do so effectively.

I like using the term WUWT & Co. for blogs that spread misinformation about climate science. It is a neutral and clear alternative to "denier blogs", which the speudo-skeptics claim points to holocaust deniers. It does not, but one should not give them too much opportunity to change the topic.

A reason to find WUWT somewhat interesting is that the pet topic of Mr. Watts is the quality of weather stations. That is how I got introduced to the man. After writing a paper on the homogenization methods to remove non-climatic changes from historical instrumental data, I wrote a blog post about this. Knowing that Roger Pielke Sr. was also interested in that topic, I asked if Pielke was willing to repost it. He referred me to Watts, who asked me for permission to repost it. He probably thought I was okay, because of Pielke. After reading that homogenization improves temperature trend estimates, he never published it. You have to set priorities.

The main reason for my interest, however, is probably my personality. I like to understand how things work. I like civilised debate. I like reason. Hearing or inventing a new strong argument is a joy, similar to the joy of listening or making music. When I hear a claim, no matter how much I like the person or claim, my brain automatically starts producing counter arguments. This is a very effective way to annoy people, my apologies to all my friends for that.

That is who I am, that is why I became a scientist. I also believe that reason, civilised debate and the power of arguments are what have given us the rule of law, democracy, human right and prosperity. They are the foundation of our open societies and they are what WUWT and Co. are destroying in their political battle against science.

Knowing a little about climate and knowing how science works, it is obvious to me how wrong most of the WUWT posts are. It would be hard for me not to refute this nonsense. As WUWT is the biggest blog of this community and can be seen as its mainstream, it seems to make sense to give it more attention as even more extremist blogs that not even pseudo-sceptics take seriously.

Creationism is even more irrational. The evidence for evolution is even stronger as for climate change, by orders of magnitude stronger. However, that is a local problem the Americans have to deal with. The misinformation of WUWT and Co. affects all. Climate change is certainly not the only important global problem, but a solvable one.

If people would decide that it is better to suffer the consequences as to solve the problem, so be it, that is democracy or as Jac. commented at AndThenTheresPhysics:

In a democracy, you have to respect if the people’s consent is that they will accept climate change with all its consequences to happen; but at least let scientists make sure it is an ‘informed consent’ then.

That quote is the end of an interesting discussion at AndThenTheresPhysics. A discussion about the value of refuting climate "sceptics" and how scientists can contribute. As many people do not read comments, I would like to summarise this discussion below.

I have to admit to like reading comments (and call-in radio), especially at AndThenTheresPhysics. Most comments are not informative, but you have the chance of reading or hearing something you might otherwise not hear in the mainstream media.

Others disagree and like comments less.

"I saw a sound, well-reasoned argument in an internet comment, and it made me reconsider my position." -- Nobody, ever

The answer to the second part is that it is rare that people who worry about climate change make claims that are clearly untenable. Reality is sufficiently scary and is for them more then enough reason to act. Furthermore, climate change is a wicked problem with a lot of uncertainty and especially on the warm side it is hard to exclude much. Still, if people get too warm and fuzzy about climate change, I naturally do correct them.

My favorite future blogger, Mark Ryan, replies:

Mike Fayette’s comments, and his experience, are very interesting, [VV: If someone at a scientific conference starts a reply this friendly, expect a nasty comment or question.] and make me think about the problem of how scientific communities relate to evidence, compared with how the public –and particularly the political communities in the public- relate to it.

There is a lot of confusion about the fact that knowledge is fundamentally a social property –no individual can claim decisive knowledge across a domain (actually, some individuals obviously do, but they’re invariably wrong). What happens instead is that individuals [scientists] build on what they understand to be established knowledge, do their work, and add it to the constellation of previous and contemporary contributions.

Some elements within the knowledge constellation are much better established than others, and are therefore more likely to be true –with the well-worn caveat that no question is ever 100% closed. But this caveat is actually much more trivial than those who misunderstand it would have us believe; this point was never made better than in this short essay by Isaac Asimov. This is the best response I can think of to Mike’s earlier remark about competing theories in science.

There must be a hierarchy of knowledge for scientific knowledge to be possible. Core ideas support the contingent or peripheral ideas, otherwise every researcher’s work would arbitrarily re-establish first principles. ... Almost all research deals with anomalies or minor controversies, but based on established foundations; if someone wants to remake the foundations, they quite rightly find it hard going. ...

We have had over four decades now of a constant conflation of politics and science, a response to the culture of scientistic authority promoted in mid 20th century, and the new kinds of health and environmental risks that modern life has created. The net result is that complex and specialised knowledge is counterposed to commonsense and intuitive, easy to relate to, (but incorrect) alternatives. This is the “better story” that Mike mentioned, and large percentages of the public just buy into this without a second thought, because they are now conditioned to look straight past specialist scientific knowledge to project political motives onto the people making it. For people who buy into this politicisation of science, there is no need to educate themselves to understand the complex theories and jargon of the scientists, because in any case, they imagine scientists use facts the way we all see lawyers use facts in various media. It does not occur to them that the simple explanation has already been considered and improved on by the people who study the topic. ...

A clear example of such a simple explanation is the meme going round that CO2 is heavier than air, will thus stay close to the ground and cannot act like a greenhouse gas. (This ignores turbulent mixing.) Do people really think that no scientist in all these decades has ever tried to measure up to which height CO2 is a well mixed gas? It is fine to ask such a question. It is insane to immediately claim to have refuted the greenhouse effect.

ATTP, you said in your post that you were going through a phase of wondering what the whole point is.

It is a few years back now, but I started reading blogs like this one as a skeptic. My training is in politics and the philosophy of science, which at least gave me some basis for spotting patterns in the literature I was reading. My interest in climate came from my interest in the philosophy of statistics, but I had read social theorists like Thomas Kuhn, Harry Collins and Michel Foucault, and was predisposed to a very political take on the production of scientific knowledge.

Not having the appropriate scientific background, I needed to visit sites like this – at the time it was Tamino, Skeptical Science, Real Climate[,] etc, just so I could understand what I was looking at when I tackled even things like IPCC papers. Eventually, the most striking pattern I found in the so-called ‘mainstream’ climate literature was a constellation of arguments converging towards consilience [consilience refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" to strong conclusions], and a rigorous commitment to explaining the science. I didn’t find sites like Joe Romm’s very helpful, by contrast.

On the so-called “skeptical” sites, and in the small amount of scholarly literature, the pattern is negative -mutually contradictory arguments. This body of literature was not converging to an alternative, but was fixated on driving wedges into any cracks of uncertainty they could find. It was the comparative ‘shapes’ of the two different bodies of argument that convinced me.

I want to say I think what you do is tremendously valuable; it is clear, articulate, and sets a tone that encourages skeptical people, like the one I used to be, to stay with you. In this intensely polarised environment, that is a delicate act to pull off, but if I was running a blog, you would be one of my models. It is one of the unfortunate things about blogging, that you send your missives out into the void and never quite know whether you’re making any difference -it’s a kind of alienated form of social being, in a way. But you create a rare environment here, so well done.

Jac. had a similar experience as Mark Ryan and added:

... I am not a scientist. I am working in the legal/judicial system. The number of climate change cases that are brought to the courts is growing, and so is the body of literature about climate change liability that I am especially interested in. I think I am quite well informed on the legal liability aspects of climate change and the potential role of the judiciary. I started reading off and on some blogs about climate change some months ago, because I wanted to try to understand some of the science as well, and I also wanted to learn and understand about the way scientists and skeptics interact and discuss about their arguments and what these arguments are.

So my background and reason to start reading this blog seems to be somewhat similar to Mark Ryan. I completely agree with what he wrote (23/5, 1.30 pm) about the ‘shape of the two bodies of arguments’. I made the same observations, and arrived at the same conclusion.

I also noticed that generally speaking there is a difference in ‘tone’ and ‘style’ in the way the scientists argue and the way ‘skeptics’ argue.

Typically, the question of the scientist is one out of curiosity, whereas the questions of the skeptic are typically more like an aggressive cross-examination. Also typically the skeptic is not satisfied with the answers he gets; there is always another question following, never mind if it is coming from quite a different perspective, or he just changes the subject or disappears. Therefore, in my perception the typical skeptic is not interested in finding common ground with the scientist; he is on a ‘fishing expedition’ to see if there are any contrarian arguments that cannot easily be discarded by scientists, so he can claim that the science is far from settled and too uncertain for political decisions.

So my conclusion is that the skeptics in the blogosphere are not genuinely interested in (the advancement of) climate science.

If that analysis is correct, scientists have little if anything to win in engaging in discussions with skeptics on scientific issues because the skeptic has nothing to offer there and has a different agenda altogether. I am not at all surprised then that for scientists, discussions with skeptics can be irritating and tiresome. I assume that is what ATTP meant when he started this post.

For me these discussions are not pointless. For me, seeing how the arguments flow was helpful in understanding the climate debate. Like Tucholsky said: the understanding that the people have is usually wrong, but in their sensing the people are usually right. This blog has been guiding my ‘sensing’ of the climate debate and who is right probably just as much as it has been guiding my understanding of the arguments. ...

I wonder what it would be like if scientists would not engage in discussions with skeptics with the intention of convincing them – they won’t allow you to – but with the intention to demonstrate to other lurking readers (like me) that science has better (and more polite) answers and deeper understanding to offer than the skeptics have. It might turn out to be a whole other kind of ballgame, one that is far less frustrating for scientists.

And if you don’t feel like playing anymore, I think it would be perfectly OK to say ‘we have tried to explain you the science more than once, but either you seem not able to understand the science which is regrettable, or you just do not want to understand which is fine, but either way and with all due respect you have offered nothing to this discussion that has any merits and you and your repetitive comments are becoming a bit of a boring noise, so thank you for participating, but we will block you from this post / this blog.’ I think scientists could be a little more assertive about sticking to the rules of their discussions.

Still Climate Ball I suppose, but how scientists want to play it. If scientists start perceiving (and thus expecting) that the game is not about trying to find common scientific ground with the skeptics or about advancement of science, but about proving how wrong/mistaken the skeptics are (while still maintaining the cool, rational, unbiased and open-minded, fact-based balanced way of truly scientific reasoning that, in my view, really is the stronghold of scientists that earns them credibility), scientists might find it less frustrating to be playing the game. In this other version of Climate Ball moving the goalposts is considered as acknowledging you have lost the previous argument. Don’t complain about moving the goalposts, but instead explicitly claim it as victory and as soliciting for another beating on another subject.

My selfish reason for suggesting this is that I would not want the scientists getting so frustrated that they are pulling out of the debate.

FoxGoose, it’s an open secret that I used to be a fake sceptic. At one time, it was something of a USP [Unique Selling Point], even. Quote mining my past is an old, tired tactic. It also reveals something rather unpleasant about those doing it.

- I’ve got the balls to keep the same screen name and own every statement I’ve ever made in public using it.

- Once I discover that I have been lied to and manipulated, I never forgive and I never forget.

Rachel naturally asked: "Wow, BBD. What made you change your mind?"

I discovered that I was being lied to. This simply by comparing the “sceptic” narrative with the standard version. Unlike my fellow “sceptics” I was still just barely sceptical enough (though sunk in denial) to check both versions. Once I realised what was going on, that was the end of BBD the lukewarmer (NB: I was never so far gone as to deny the basic physics, only to pretend that S [the climate sensitivity] was very low). All horribly embarrassing now, of course, but you live and learn. Or at least, some of us do. ...

Always check. Fail to do this in business and you will end up bankrupt and in the courts. I failed to check, at least initially, and made a colossal prat out of myself. Oh, and never underestimate the power of denial (aka ‘wishful thinking’). It’s brought down better people than me. ...

There wasn’t a single, defining eureka moment, just a growing sense of unease because nothing seemed to add up. ... Once I eventually started to compare WUWT [Watts Up With That] with RC [RealClimate] and SkS [Skeptical Science], that was it, really.

Thus maybe the information deficit model is not that bad. At least when people have to time to gather all information, hear all sides and think it over. Thinking deficit model might be a better name. How do we get people to start thinking? One way would be to reduce the vitriol in posts about science, this reduces critical thinking and strengthens tribal thinking. (Hard to do, the dramatic opening helped to get you to read until here.)

It also points to the importance of trust. Being lied to is not nice. In that respect I would not expect BBD to ever go back to the climate "sceptics". If BBD detects an inconsistency, I would expect that he would simply point it out to scientists. The way scientists do. If the evidence changes, you will hear it first from scientists.

Building up trust again will be hard for the pseudo-sceptics after having displayed how untrustworthy they are. But it would help if they would stop their disinformation campaign against science, stop repeating their completely idiotic talking points, and would start to make scientifically valid points about real uncertainties and weaknesses. They would be welcomed back home. Unfortunately, that is somehow a huge if and I do not expect this to ever happen, just to see the group get smaller and smaller, being laughed at by their neighbours and die out.

Steve Bloom wondered:

Jac, as I’m sure you know, most scientists, even climate scientists, choose not to play [Climateball] at all. But is it helpful to imagine the response to this blog (and the climate science blogosphere generally) of such a non-player who is considering starting to play? Is the lesson that other forms of engagement and outreach (e.g. reaching out to their local media and giving community talks) are a better use of their time? Or maybe it’s most effective to instead focus their research efforts onto things that will inform a better policy direction?

Many scientists are introverted or otherwise not interested in a public debate. That is fine. As a community we should be present, but people should do what they do best. Most "challenges" by pseudo-sceptics are so basic and repetitive that many lay people following the climate "debate" may well be better suited to reply.

Outreach will not help you avoiding the pseudo-sceptics. They will be the ones motivated to ask the questions. Expect some creative and weird ones. But eye to eye even pseudo-sceptics know how to behave. Youtube suggests that the main exception to that rule is Lord Monckton. (Highly recommended funny video about the comedian behind Monckton).

To close, Willard summarised the climate "debate" as:

ClimateBall™ can be fun! Stripped down to its bare essentials, ClimateBall ™ is just a conversation disguised as a scientific discussion.

More seriously, Jac. closed with the main purpose of the "debate":

In a democracy, you have to respect if the people’s consent is that they will accept climate change with all its consequences to happen; but at least let scientists make sure it is an ‘informed consent’ then.

What did I learn about the climate "debate" from the above comments?

1. Do not expect to be able to convince the people that have being a climate sceptics as their identity. Explain the science and explain why the climate "sceptics" are wrong for the lurkers. Explain why science is fun and why it produces reliable knowledge. Show you are open and interested in a better understanding.

2. Stay on topic to be able to go in depth like scientists would if they have a dispute. Pseudo-sceptics like to change topics before acknowledging that they were wrong on this first one. Make this strategy clear to the lurkers and explain that this suggests that the pseudo-sceptics are not really interested in understanding the problem. If necessary "answer" new topics with links (e.g. to the Skeptical Science list of Global Warming & Climate Change Myths).

3. Be friendly to people you do not know and might be honestly interested in the answer. There is no need to accept any kind of abuse, but try to make sure that there is a clear difference in tone between science and non-science.

4. Search for the name of your discussion partner and the topic. Very often he has discussed the topic before somewhere else and already knows all the answers. In this case, point out to the lurkers that your discussion partner is not interested in the answer, but just wants to create doubt.

6. Another function of the ugly language may be to discourage scientists from taking part. Try to ignore the misconduct and not to take it personally. These people do not know you and are only demonstrating their own problems. This is clearly illustrated by the hilarious puns on my last name. If those people would know me only a little bit, they would at least write something about homogenization or about my fixation with WUWT.

Try to have fun playing climateball and keep your eye on the WUWT ball.

3. I’d like less name calling. The temptation is great, and I myself sometimes fall victim to that temptation. I’ll do better to lead by example in any comments I make.
4. I’d like to see less trolling and more constructive commentary. One way to achieve that is to pay attention.

Let's see, how this works out. I am somewhat sceptical because they need the tribal atmosphere to suppress critical thinking. ]

[UPDATE: Just found an old post on Skeptical Science, Understanding climate denial, that mentions three more people that changed their mind based on the evidence, D.R. Tucker, Craig Good & Nathan McKaskle. It is not impossible, but probably still rare. Ironically Nathan McKaskle used to be a blogger, but gave up not knowing whether he had changed a single mind. That is a pity, changing people's minds does not happen immediately after reading an article, it takes time, if only to be able to say that one has always held the new position.]

[UPDATE 2016. Just found two more people convinced by science: Windchasers and Tadaaa. It does happen.]

Every time I examined a denialist argument, a little research quickly convinced me that they were wrong; invariably their references were unreliable and their arguments incoherent. When it came to disagreeing with the alarmists, even if the worst outcomes they predicted were questionable and sometimes overstated, their overall case was coherent and based on solid references.

Wednesday, 4 June 2014

Just briefly to note that a discussion paper is now open for comment authored by the members of the benchmarking working group. This paper discusses the concepts and frameworks that will underpin all aspects of the benchmarking and assessment exercise. Its open to review until July 30th. Please do, if you have time and inclination, pop along and have a read and provide a constructive (!) review. The discussion site is at http://www.geosci-instrum-method-data-syst-discuss.net/4/235/2014/gid-4-235-2014.html .

Also, watch this space at the end of this month for exciting developments on the first pillar of the ISTI framework - the databank.

Finally, we are rapidly hurtling towards the SAMSI/IMAGe/ISTI workshop on surface temperatures and their analyses. Its going to be a busy few weeks so expect this blog to be somewhat less moribund than of late ...

Monday, 2 June 2014

[UPDATE: WUWT Moderator dbstealey feels that William M. Connolley is evil; see below]

Anthony Watts has a reposted an ugly article by Pointman about William M. Connolley, in which I have a cameo appearance as collateral damage. The comments below the post are below any level. Williams name inspires these good Christians to toilet puns. My last name reminds these Republicans of the last time they had anal sex. I guess it would be of no use to explain these man of the world that the Dutch name Venema does not rhyme to the English word enema.

Maybe Anthony Watts did not notice these comments, he is so busy searching for the truth after all. Thus I asked him:

Dear Anthony, I am saddened that you would repost something like this. I had expected better of you. While I understand it would be pointless to ask Pointman to do so, could you at least remove the pun on my name by ATheoK and the various hilarious puns on William Connolley's name, please?

This comment was not published, but replaced by [noted]. The comment by ATheoK was not changed. And I even asked politely, last time the enema appeared on WUWT, Anthony Watts was only willing to remove it if I repeated the request with the magic word please.

My next comment:

Victor Venema says: [noted]

Dear Anthony Watts, it is regretful that you approve of the horrible language used in these comments. This ugliness is not something I had expected to see at WUWT, if only on opportunistic grounds. Don't you want WUWT to be a broadly read somewhat respectable mainstream anti-CAGW blog? The comments on this post do not sound like conservative or Christian family values to me, but more like atheist übermensch extremist thinking.

If you have to resort to this kind of language, you have lost the rational debate. Kudos for making this official.

While we now know that you condone abusive language, I am wondering if you also officially support misinformation. You know that this statement by NikFromNYC is wrong: "Here is the hockey stick you [Connolley] helped create, the WUWT site rating that just tripled in 2013: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com"

In the hope of getting this one published, I had not added the link with the evidence that Watts has no respect for reality whatever the topic.

Fortunately not all conservative Christians are like Watts and his ilk. Maybe it helped that I had just had a long detailed and mainly pleasant discussion with Evan Jones on the Watts et al. (2012) manuscript. If people want to honestly discuss science, I am happy to talk to them if I have some expertise. Jones writes:

Over the last year-plus, I have had oddly reasonable exchanges with both Connolley and Victor Venema concerning the surfacestations paper. We explored their three main objections and have addressed them. That was actually quite valuable, as it turns out.

I do understand that they are controversial figures, and many have crossed swords with them, but I have made out okay. They found out we are for real — which they needed to know. I found out what their criticisms are and where how they will be arguing against the paper, down the road — which I needed to know.

REPLY: he seems to have a different persona when not in public view. In my case here and at his own blog, he wears his contempt on his sleeve – Anthony

While I understand that conservatives do not like some of the proposals for policies to combat climate change put forward by progressives and greens, I am disappointed by them tolerating this kind of language in their ranks. Weren't the conservatives once the people that wanted to conserve civilised manners, that claimed to have the moral and Christian values on their side? What happened to these conservatives? How could the rude behaviour of Anthony Watts and Rush Limbaugh become the conservative life style?

If you would explain a Martian the original conservative ideology, these Martians would expect conservatives to respond to climate change the way Newt Gingrich proposed, instead of betraying their own values in comments at WUWT and Co.

[UPDATE: It has gotten even worse, after all the vitriol there were two sane comments.

None of which excuses the reference to him [@wmconnolley] in the original article as “creature” or the comment reference “sub-human”.

I agree with The Other Phil. It doesn’t help to simply throw names at anyone,especially not terms with such an unpleasant history

Evil is not limited to the occasional spree killer. In the last century Hitler and Stalin oversaw cults of personality built on this same model under which millions died. Stalin’s Communism and Hitler’s National Socialism were messy and contradictory ideologies. They ultimately existed so that one man could exercise his power fantasies and destroy as much of the world as he could. And here in our own country, there is an ideology that is obsessed with controlling and shaping all of human behavior. We call that ideology by many names such as liberalism or progressivism, but it’s more accurately a diseased narcissism whose followers strive to stamp out anyone who doesn’t think like them, and to control the lives of everyone else.

And commented that quote with:

It’s from another blog, but guess who it applies to here [my bold].

That also applies to Michael Mann. Anyone reading his tweets and other comments knows what a warped person he is. Personally, I could understand pretending to have won the Nobel Prize. Lots of insecure folks self-aggrandize with fictitious accomplishments. But Mann constantly flings out insults at anyone and everyone who doesn’t toe his line, and he cowers from any fair debate [I suspect that connolley would tuck tail and run from any fair, moderated debate, too, since the science flatly contradicts his bogus narrative].

We are dealing with people who would be rejected by any normal society. But this is life in the new millennium. We just have to keep plugging away. And so far, it’s working.

Creature, sub-human, "the WC needed cleaning", "WC flushed", odious toads, evil, Hitler, Stalin and diseased narcissism. Those are the words of extremists, I would not want to get my science information from.

The idea that William M. Connolley would run away from any debate is almost funny. Given that he was commenting below this ugly post, which is an unfair and badly moderated debate, especially when dbstealey comments using one of his many sock-puppets and simultaneously moderates his opponents. Previously Connolley has offered to debate Lord Monckton, but the Lord did not take up the offer.

The often used term narcissistic to describe Connolley is probably the most ironic part. It is pure projection: it are the extremists at WUWT that think that William M. Connolley single handedly kept Wikipedia's climate articles clean of their nonsense. They are the ones that do not recognise the swarm intelligence of Wikipedia and how Connolley could never have kept Wikipedia clean without the other Wikipedia editors and the scientific literature.]

[UPDATE II Now also Anthony Watts chipped in. His response below my second comment, the published one, is rather long and content free. You can read it in this archive if you want to check my paraphrases.

I found it because William M. Connolley tweeted: AW invents new version of Godwin: "Oh puhleeze, invoke Jesus? Nope that’s when YOU lose".

The key sentence may be: "I know your university stoked ego can’t assimilate criticism from us mere peasants, so I don’t bother."

It would be nice if he would not bother and would stop the misinformation campaign, he calls "criticism" and I call WUWT.

The term "university stoked ego" probably tells more about Watt's inferiority complex than about me. My last name, which the ugly crowd at WUWT likes to make fun of, actually means peat bog worker in Dutch. I am the first in my family to obtain a PhD. Coming from a relatively poor background I am extremely thankful for the enormous support and trust society has given me for my studies and now to be allowed to do the job I love.

A job I love because of the culture of curiosity, reason, civility and truth. The anti-thesis of WUWT and Co. If Watts feels like a peasant, he might think about why scholars, scientists and cultured people no longer feel welcome in the Republican party where only two generations ago they could still be proud to be a Republican. These groups have the same range of political preferences as everyone else. Thus my guess would be that they are disgusted by the anti-intellectual and coarse political culture and by people putting ideology above values. WUWT is a mere symptom of this larger problem.

Watts may also feel inferior because people so often find that the posts at WUWT are completely wrong. This is documented daily on HotWhopper. However, Watts should not take this personally. If I had to publish five posts a day, my quality would also go down. Especially, if those posts would have to follow an ideological story line and I could thus not orient myself by the scientific literature. Given those difficult circumstances, Watts is doing a great job and I have often praised him as a great PR expert.

The next complaint is that I would "whip up comments here [at WUWT] then go write a post [at Variable Variability] about how terrible we are here [at WUWT]." I don't know. I thought this was called decency. To first alert Anthony Watts that there is a problem and to give him the possibility to correct it. I find that more decent as immediately writing a post about an over-the-top comment, the way Anthony Watts did about a comment someone made at AndThenTheresPhysics that was removed when people complained. But maybe those are just my exotic moral values.

Is it necessary to state that the comments below that WUWT post on AndThenTheresPhysics were similarly hateful. But were not removed?

Watts published my comment email address; the good Christian regularly intimidates people by publishing private information when he feels cornered. He "calls me out" for using my university email privately and threatens to write a blog post about Victor Venema and the University of Bonn to flesh this out. Nice chap, isn't he? That will stimulate civilised debate.

(Dear readers, do not worry, private use of the internet is allowed in Bonn and Germany has freedom of research in its constitution, thus I do not have to fear harassment by the fake sceptics. I am happy to life in a country where scientists cannot be bullied by political pressure groups that do not like the inconvenient results.) ]